John Updike’s Transparent Eyeball

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike
Knopf, 1989, 257 pp., $18.95

A chapter from John Updike’s Self Consciousness ran some months ago in Commentary under the provocative title, “On Not Being a Dove.” Updike looked back at the loneliness that overtook him during the high tide of antiwar indignation in the sixties and seventies, when he, one man against the mob, remained a supporter of Amer...